I-cubed: The Internet and Inexpensive Interactivities

My proposal to present at FETC was accepted this year. The session abstract reads:

Join the presenter for a whirlwind tour of free and inexpensive Internet tools to design interactivities for students and interactions with their families.

I think I'm going to try to get a few key concepts across in the time I have: web 2.0 and remix, a framework for classroom interactions, and "small pieces loosely joined." The tools will very much be of the web 2.0 variety. So far, the framework I have in mind looks like this:

• Student-teacher
• Student-content
• Student-student (Moore, 1989)
  
• Student-self (metacognition) (not sure of a citation on this - I'm not home now)
  
• Student-world
• School-home
• I'll probably skip student-interface (Hillman, Willis, & Gunawardena, 1994) for this presentation.
  

Of course, there's a similar list for teacher interactions, but that's beyond the scope of this talk. (Maybe next year.) I think I'll loosely classify the tools I show within that framework, i.e. game and puzzle makers are useful for student-content interactions and Cmap Tools useful for student-student and student-self interactions. Hopefully, this framework will make the laundry list of tools useful for lesson planning - a good goal for this conference audience.

Finally, if the items in the laundry list are the "small pieces," then web presence for a classroom brings in the "loosely joined" aspect. I plan to show a few low-threshold ways (i.e. Classwebs, NiceNet, and others) for teachers to set up a space to join these small pieces to suit their instructional purposes.

Contemporary Online Teaching Cases

Take a look at this site! They've conducted over 70 interviews to develop case studies of online teaching strategies. They've developed categories including online teaching cases and have categorized them Thanks to James Farmer of Incorporated Subversion for pointing this out. I'm going to use it as a reference as I move forward from here.

Another good idea from Dennis Jerz

I am so glad people like Dennis Jerz are blogging. I've had limited opportunities to experiment with the newer social software tools, but am looking forward to porting another of Jerz' ideas from the Literature classroom into my own. A local university has contacted me about adjuncting for the past two semester and the dissertation-related research has prevented me from teaching their classes. I'm crossing my fingers they offer me a chance this Spring. I would really like to try using some of these newer technologies in something besides a short staff development course.

Here's the Plan!

Today, I read the Graduate Studies website and the Thesis and Dissertation Manual. Here's my plan.

10/17/05 Request defense date - Check
11/4/05 File intent to graduate (how exciting will that be?)
12/1/05 Finish data collection
12/5/05 Send PDF for format review
3/6/05 Send "final" dissertation draft to committee members
3/7/05 File defense announcement with C of Ed and type approval page
3/21/05 Defend
4/17/05 Final edits due to UCF Editor
4/18/05 Look for a job and plan a vacation